The place was a friggin’ nightmare. Someone could access the cottage by car, boat, ATV, or seaplane. Generally at a safe house like this, a witness protection team would have a guy or two hidden around the outside perimeter watching the place, and two inside with the witness. It would be easier to stick Olivia in the middle of a military base or an unoccupied prison wing. Yet, he didn’t want her holed up in either. She’d been through way too much already. Besides, that wouldn’t help when it came to protecting her family also. Hopefully there wouldn’t be much protecting involved. Instincts and experience told him it wasn’t the mafia after her, and it was unlikely that anyone in San Francisco knew her father’s past. He’d been too careful to confide in anyone.
Usually Ethan knew who was after a witness and why. The not knowing made his job all the more difficult. But for now, he could protect Olivia on his own. He needed Mike in San Francisco investigating leads and trying to track down this guy. After what Eduardo had claimed about an inside snitch, Mike was the only marshal Ethan trusted. Despite that, his buddy didn’t have access to the case file, so he didn’t know Alex Doyle’s real name, or Ethan’s current location. And he wouldn’t, until it was necessary.
When they reached their cottage, he set down the luggage and unlocked the door. They stepped inside, and he flipped on a light. The scent of pine and lemon cleaners assaulted his nose. He shut the door and slid the flimsy lock in place. The squirrels there were smart enough to break in.
“Not much of a lock,” Olivia said.
Not compared to the two deadbolts on her door or her state-of-the-art alarm system. Usually his witnesses started out clueless, and he had to train them to always be on guard. Her dad had taught her well. Ethan couldn’t imagine such a cautious man putting his and his daughter’s lives in danger by continuing his life of crime, and certainly not by running the scam through Olivia’s gallery. But he still wasn’t ready to rule out the possibility completely.
He glanced over at a small kitchenette, then at the red Naugahyde couch in the middle of the room. A practical piece of furniture for vacationers lounging around in wet swimsuits, but it didn’t look even half as comfortable as the worn red rug covering the knotty pine floor. Windows lined the front of the cottage, providing a scenic view of the lake, along with a clear view of them inside.
“I brought some magnetic alarms. Not real high tech, but they’ll do the job. I’ll attach them to the windows and door so we’ll know if someone opens them.” He secured the window locks and closed the green curtains decorated with mallards.
“Kind of rustic compared to the inn.”
“I’ve stayed in much worse.” She undoubtedly hadn’t. Anything less than four stars was likely slumming it for her.
She swiped a finger across a small wooden dining room table. “It’s clean, and kind of homey.” She dropped her suitcase off in one of the two bedrooms and returned, holding her cell phone. “I’ve only got one bar. I’ll probably have to climb a tree to get decent service around here. Going to see if it’s any better outside. I have to call Rachel.”
“Remember, you’re in Paris.” He’d given her a new cell phone, so whoever was after her couldn’t track them using her phone’s GPS, like he had. “I’ll join you. Need to call Mike and see if he got the results on the contents of that syringe.”
Apprehension creased her brow, like she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the truth about her father’s death. He wasn’t sure, either. If this guy had murdered her father, that promoted him from intruder to killer.
They stepped outside, and Ethan removed his phone from his waistband. “Our best bet is probably at the end of the dock, away from all the trees.” He walked toward the dock. Olivia hung back, and he turned to see a panicked expression on her face, her gaze glued to the water. Right. She was afraid of water. “It’s okay. I’m a certified rescue diver.”
“So if my body sinks to the bottom, you can find me?” Her look said
Gee thanks
.
“I think it’s pretty shallow. Dock doesn’t go out that far.” He swatted a mosquito feasting on his arm and flicked its corpse into the air.
“Bet I used to swim in this lake when I was five, and now I can’t even step foot in it.”
“Who knows, maybe by the end of the week you’ll be diving off the end of the dock.”
“Doubt that.”
They gazed across the lake lit by a full moon and lights from the cottages and homes along the shore. A brightly burning campfire illuminated a section of an island about a mile off shore. Faint voices in the distance and an occasional mosquito frying against a bug zapper filled the stillness. Suddenly, an explosion of singing came from the island.
“Omigod. This is the lake in the Impressionist painting on my dad’s wall. That’s the island in it. My dad once told me he went to camp there. One summer I wanted to go to Girl Scout camp, and he wouldn’t let me. Didn’t want me being away from home so long. I threw a fit, saying it wasn’t fair that he could go to camp and I couldn’t. Those first years we were in San Francisco I’m surprised he let me out of his sight to go to school.” She shook the memory from her head. “So the painting had been in the family for years. My dad had hung on to something from our past besides my grandma’s letter and … ” she trailed off, gazing over at him. “So it was possible for my dad to correspond with his family if he’d wanted to?”
Ethan nodded. “He could have sent letters through our D.C. office, and Roy could have arranged secured phone conversations.”
She continued staring at the island in silence.
He wanted to ask what her grandma’s letter had said, because he wanted her to confide in him. If not about the letter, then about other things. He wanted to know more about Olivia Doyle and Olivia Donovan. A lot more.
• • •
Lying on the couch, Ethan grabbed his gun off the cocktail table next to him. “Prepare to die,” he muttered.
“Chirp, chirp, chirp,” the cricket outside the window continued taunting him, not taking his threat seriously.
He flew off the couch, ready to blow the sucker away, when his phone rang. It was one
A.M.
This couldn’t be good. He grabbed the phone off the table to find Mike’s number displayed, and he answered it.
“Shit man, you aren’t gonna believe this,” Mike said.
“Not medication in the syringe?”
“I don’t know, still waiting on the results, but this guy got into her place when I wasn’t here.”
Ethan’s grip tightened around his phone. “Where the hell were you?”
“He set off a bomb at the café across the street, and I ran down to help out. Christ, I thought this guy was after some stupid paintings. Didn’t expect him to be blowing up places to distract me.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“No, thank God. Place was pretty empty. Just a few minor injuries. He seemed to know what he was doing. If he’d wanted fatalities, there’d have been some. But he had a good fifteen minutes in here, and the place is trashed. Not sure if he found what he wanted or not.”
“Were the corners of the paintings slashed?”
“No.”
Interesting. He obviously hadn’t felt anything would be hiding behind Olivia’s paintings, unlike her father’s.
“I’m following up on a few leads and hope to hunt down the asshole. Some eyewitnesses gave a vague description of a guy leaving the café just before the bomb went off, and it sounds like our guy from the cemetery. There was a security camera outside a pawn shop next door. Might be able to get something off that. I’ll call ya tomorrow. Be careful. This guy’s frickin’ nuts.”
Ethan disconnected. “Shit,” he muttered, tossing the phone and his gun on the table. This guy raised the stakes, making Ethan even more certain Olivia’s father’s death hadn’t been a heart attack.
Or wasn’t this the first place this guy had blown up? The safe house. Kind of coincidental that Ethan was now tracking down two bombers.
“Was that about me?” Olivia stood in her bedroom doorway. The full moon poured through the tops of the windows, casting her in a blue hue. Her oversized white button-down shirt was even sexier than her green silk nightgown the night before. It barely covered the tops of her slender thighs, nearly revealing what was underneath. Likely a thong. A white lace thong.
He nodded, glancing away. “Your place got broken into.”
“Is Mike okay?” Panic filled her voice.
He explained about the bomb.
Her gaze narrowed in mortified disbelief. “Was anybody hurt?”
He shook his head.
She let out a relieved sigh, walking toward him, her gaze traveling down over his bare chest to his boxers where it lingered. He nearly went hard. She stopped a few feet away. So close he could see the perspiration beading on the dip over her upper lip and the pink color flushing her cheeks.
“I wonder if he took anything,” she mused.
He shrugged. “Hard to say.”
A coyote howled in the distance, and she glanced over at the open window. The humidity had the place feeling like a sauna. If he hadn’t cracked a few windows, allowing a faint breeze in, they’d have suffocated by morning. The ancient air-conditioning unit in the window rattled and hummed too loudly to operate. He wouldn’t hear an intruder until he attempted to open the window further and set off the magnetic alarm.
She peered back over at him, wiping the perspiration from her upper lip, letting her finger rest by the side of her full lips. She had a killer mouth.
“Do you think he’s on his way here?” she asked.
“Doubt it. You didn’t leave anything behind to lead him here, did you?” He’d told her to secure all her dad’s info in her safe — hidden behind a bookshelf — and to make sure she didn’t leave a copy of their airline itinerary lying around.
“I locked everything in my safe. But I found an airline itinerary at my dad’s, dated several years ago for us to fly to Madison. It was inside an unglued cover of his Bible. This guy might have found it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Didn’t even think of it. Figured if he’s from my dad’s past, it wasn’t much of a clue for him. Besides, Wisconsin is a big state. If he didn’t know about Five Lakes, he’d have to find something tying my dad to here.”
If this guy wasn’t her dad’s forgery partner, what else would her father have had worth hurting, possibly killing, people over?
She fidgeted with the ring resting between her breasts, her skin gleaming with perspiration. A background check had confirmed she’d never been married. And an engagement ring would be worn on her finger, unless that was some new craze to wear it on a chain. But she hadn’t told anybody besides her gallery partner that she was leaving town. He glanced up to find her watching him.
She placed a hand against the ring, pressing it against her chest. “It was my mom’s … I think.”
He hadn’t kept his mother’s ring. Hadn’t wanted any reminders of her marriage to his father. If he’d thought of it at the time, he’d have made sure she wasn’t buried in it, and he’d have destroyed it. Maybe his aunt had removed it. He’d been thinking about his mother a lot since the cemetery and the parole hearing yesterday.
As though she could read his mind, Olivia stepped forward and cautiously reached out and touched the scar on his cheek, brushing a gentle finger across it. His initial instinct was to pull back, but he didn’t. Her gaze followed her finger as she traced it along his jawline to his chin. She paused a moment before brushing it across his lips, raising her gaze to his.
He wanted her to do a lot more than touch a finger to his lips. He lowered his lips to hers, capturing her mouth, his tongue darting between her lips, wrapping around her tongue. She welcomed his tongue with the same sense of urgency, sweeping her arms up over his chest and around to the back of his neck. She tunneled her fingers through his hair while he slipped his arms around her waist, gathering up fistfuls of her shirt, pressing her soft belly against his hard erection, her full breasts against the plane of his chest.
A coyote howled. His body tensed and he drew back his head, his gaze darting to the window. Their labored breathing swelled their chests against each other. He felt like they’d just outrun the bad guy.
He was here to protect Olivia’s ass, not feel it up. What if that coyote had been the crazed bomber? He knew the bomber was still in San Francisco, but for how long? What the hell was Ethan doing kissing Olivia, taking advantage of her “knight in shining armor” syndrome? Women under his protection often viewed him as their rescuer, protecting them when their husbands or nobody else could. It was his job to keep things on a professional level. He always had. Until now.
She gazed up at him with a sexy-as-hell look that begged him to take her right there on the stiff, uninviting couch. A look that made him want to say screw professionalism.
He reigned in his emotions and stepped back, releasing her from his embrace, her arms slipping from around his neck. “You better try to get some sleep.”
Her gaze narrowed in confusion then a wounded expression spread across her face and she turned and walked toward her bedroom. He’d take her wounded
look
over her wounded body any day. He couldn’t let anything happen to Olivia.
The morning sun filtered through the lace curtains, and Bella Newman blinked the groggy haze from her head.
Was it Sunday?
Did she have anything clean to wear to church? On Sunday, she and Stan used to go to church, then out for breakfast afterward. He’d always get cinnamon French toast, and she’d get two eggs over easy with whole wheat toast. Predictable, but comfortable, like much of their marriage. Three years ago, before Stan had died, she couldn’t have imagined not going to church. But she was so tired. She could miss this once.
She slipped on her glasses and peered at the calendar on the nightstand. Unless she’d forgotten to cross off Saturday before going to bed, today wasn’t Sunday anyhow. If tourists didn’t rely on her, some mornings she wouldn’t bother getting out of bed.
The clock read seven. Morning used to be her favorite time of day. She’d get up at five and enjoy a cup of coffee on the porch swing. Now, she didn’t need to be open for business until ten, so she had several hours she could continue lying there.